Dams Get ‘Spring Cleaning’ Work Will Aid Survival Of Spawning Slamon

There’s plenty of water around, but even a massive hydroelectric dam tends to get dirty.

With salmon survival in mind, the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers will spend the month of February performing “spring cleaning” at dams it operates throughout the Columbia Basin.

At Ice Harbor Dam on the lower Snake River, Scott Sutliff wants migrating salmon to feel at home - or as comfortable as a fish can after swimming 400 miles against the current on an empty stomach.

Between 10,000 and 100,000 fish every year swim up the ladders at the dam on their way up the Snake to spawn and die, corps spokesman Dutch Meier said.

Usually, it takes fish about five hours to traverse the artificial system of rapids that rise 100 feet in a quarter mile.

“I’ve been told that it’s like humans climbing stairs,” Ice Harbor resource manager Lee Hunt said. “They might get a little winded at the top.”

Sutliff and his crews are spending the month tightening and repairing the corridors where fish pass around and over the 100-foot-high dam.

“The whole system gets cleaned out,” Meier said. Driftwood, potato chip bags and algae are removed and broken screens are mended.

“All of this is geared to keep fish-friendly facilities. If we didn’t clean them out, it would eventually become difficult for return-migrating adults” to make it upstream.

Ice Harbor Dam is one of four operated by the corps on the lower Snake River. The hydroelectric power plant 10 miles east of Pasco runs a half-mile long and holds back 32-mile-long Lake Sacajawea.

This year, the corps is focusing on a set of 35-year-old screens that are scheduled for repair or replacement, Sutliff said.

“We do need some major work down here,” Sutliff said of the dam, completed in 1961 at a cost of $130 million. “This is probably the worst in need, because it’s the oldest.”

It takes a week for the water to wash out of the ladders, which continue to smell vaguely like fish, even when the flow is reduced to a trickle.